Theatre and Governance in Britain, 1500-1900: Democracy, Disorder and the State

Description

This book begins with a simple observation - that just as the theatre resurfaced during the late Renaissance, so too government as we understand it today also began to appear. Their mutually entwining history was to have a profound influence on the development of the modern British stage. This volume proposes a new reading of theatre's relation to the public sphere. Employing a series of historical case studies drawn from the London theatre, Tony Fisher shows why the stage was of such great concern to government by offering close readings of well-known religious, moral, political, economic and legal disputes over the role, purpose and function of the stage in the 'well-ordered society'. In framing these disputes in relation to what Michel Foucault called the emerging 'art of government', this book draws out - for the first time - a full genealogy of the governmental 'discourse on the theatre'.

Tony Fisher is a Reader in Theatre and Philosophy at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, where he is Associate Director of Research (Research Degrees). He has published a number of journal articles in both theatre and philosophy, and he is the co-editor of books including Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance and Radical Democracy (2016) and Theatre, Performance, Foucault! (forthcoming).

'In this masterful and original study, Fisher combines philosophical reflection, discourse analysis and substantial archival research to produce a new way of considering the symbiotic relationship between state and theatre. While focused on English theatre history between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, its approach could and should be applied with profit to other countries as well.' Christopher Balme, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen